Wednesday, March 30, 2011

Many of us are old snorty conservative c64-sceners and have a hard time understanding what all the fuss is about concerning these more modern machines called Amiga, Atari ST, PC, Super Nintendo, Dreamcast, PSP and godknowswhat. Home computers such as VIC20, CBM PET, C128, C16, Plus/4 and perhaps ZX Spectrum seems more like it in our book, more so than those odd nonclassical devices anyway. In any case will this chapter ask the common Commodore 64 scener (although "common" obviously is an almost condescending adjective when used on us) to have a generous mind. As votesheets were handed out at the multiplatform event of Datastorm, the author of this chapter thought it be interesting to see what it is all about. Consider it suggestions of what can be interesting to investigate, when time is plenty enough to let Your c64 wait that is. If this chapter offends You to much, just return to the main menu and try and forget all about it. A special edition of this issue of VN, where this chapter has been removed, is available for those who find it necessary.

When coming from a c64 demoscene perspective and watch demos made on modern machinery one can sometimes feel bewildered and puzzled. However, the utter beauty of some Andromeda Software Development and Farbrausch productions would astonish just about all of us. LifeForce, Debris, Rupture, Masagin and Linger in Shadows are demos that I would, and will, suggest anyone to observe and contemplate. Anything else I would consider a sincere loss for that person. Seriously, those demos are brilliant.

Slightly modified excerpts from the original article I wrote for the disk magazine VN#55, published March 21st 2011.

"If I have seen further than others, it is by standing upon the shoulders of giants"(Sir Isaac Newton)

"you chose to act as if you had never been molded into civil society and had everything to begin anew. You began ill, because you began by despising everything that belonged to you."(Edmund Burke in Reflections on the Revolution in France)

"Whenever a theory appears to you as the only possible one, take this as a sign that you have neither understood the theory nor the problem which it was intended to solve"(Sir Karl Popper)

Liberty is, of course, a loftier goal. But only those who have never known disorder fail to grasp that [order] is the necessary precondition for liberty."(Niall Ferguson in Colossus)

"When every benefit received is a right, there is no place for good manners, let alone for gratitude."(Theodore Dalrymple in What is Poverty?)

"If we extend unlimited tolerance even to those who are intolerant, if we are not prepared to defend a tolerant society against the onslaught of the intolerant, then the tolerant will be destroyed, and tolerance with them. // We should therefore claim, in the name of tolerance, the right not to tolerate the intolerant."(Sir Karl Popper on the paradox of freedom in The Open Society and Its Enemies)

"Much of the social history of the Western world over the past three decades has involved replacing what worked with what sounded good. // The amazing thing is that this history of failure and disaster has neither discouraged the social engineers nor discredited them."(Thomas Sowell in Is Reality Optional?)

"Government has become ungovernable; that is, it cannot leave off governing. Law has become lawless; that is, it cannot see where laws should stop."

(G.K. Chesterton in Eugenics and Other Evils: An Argument Against the Scientifically Organized State)

"to take part in a severe contest between intelligence, which presses forward, and an unworthy, timid ignorance obstructing our progress."(The aim of The Economist)"This is the lesson: Never give in. Never give in. Never, never, never, never - in nothing, great or small, large or petty - never give in except to convictions of honour and good sense. Never yield to force; never yield to the apparently overwhelming might of the enemy."(Sir Winston Churchill, October 29th 1941, Harrow School , London)